A clear indication that an economy is in a dire state are programmers waiting for an employment at Employment Service. That’s the situation we are currently experiencing in Slovenia and I’ve come to understand it much better recently when we posted a job advertisement for a full-stack software engineer and got a stream of candidates relayed to us from the Employment Service of Slovenia (the official registry of people actively looking for work). While great programmers with a lot of experience still find job at software vendors with ease, candidates with less experience or potential struggle. Namely, several software vendors went bankrupt recently while others severely limited hiring, thus creating imbalance between supply and demand for programmers.

Just like the rest of Slovenian economy, Slovenian software vendors relied too heavily on government procurement and shady markets of southeastern Europe. When these markets imploded over the past four years, many (if not most) Slovenian companies received a serious shock. I believe that in the long run such shock is very beneficial since it will force Slovenian companies to develop innovative products and services, and not just develop whatever sells at the moment. But in the short run there will be only tears, blood, and sweat, since inadequate ownership structure, lack of capital, incompetence at product development, and poor sales capabilities severely limit possibilities available to Slovenian companies, both those developing software and those in other industries.

Let me conclude with a proposal/request to hiring managers at the few companies (such as Zemanta) that still employ new people. When posting a job advertisement, post it also at Employement Service. While stream of candidates that you will receive won’t be of such high quality as from StackOverflow, there are still quite many interesting people waiting for employment there.

I attended TSstartup mentors meetup yesterday and I came away again impressed by the current generation of startups there. Not only they have some great ideas, but they also seem to be working hard and are not afraid of pivoting on their conceptions. Among these startups I was in particular impressed by the progress of ShowMeAround team. What they are trying to build is something similar to airbnb, but for sightseeing instead of lodgings. The idea is that many visitors are fed up with standard packaged tours and want to have pristine experience of a new place and actual interactions with the locals. On the other hand, locals who want to earn some extra money (e.g. students) can share their knowledge and love for their hometown, while meeting interesting people from throughout the world.

In my opinion, the only Slovenian startups with a decent chance of success internationally are the ones exploiting some particularity of our local environment. Ljubljana has a huge student population, it’s becoming very popular with visitors, and locals still aren’t annoyed by tourists. I think all these makes Ljubljana a perfect place to kick-off a service such as ShowMeAround. If I would have some 25K euros for an angel investment to make (unfortunately, I don’t) I would seriously consider these three young lads. I think they are up to something big.